First Thing Monday – July 24 2017

Honestly, you’d be much better off checking Google Analytics. Ask a natural language question; get a direct answer. And when all eyes turn to you, you’ll know exactly how many visitors and conversions you got from last week’s sale.

In other news, Google previewed a dramatic change to its homepage. And Amazon launched a social network for shoppers.

What if you didn’t have to bother your analytics team anytime you had a question about your website or digital campaign performance?

Sure, you could log in to Google Analytics yourself, or ask your agency to provide the data.

But don’t you wish you could simply ask the question and have Google Analytics give you the answer?

Your wish is about to come true. Over the next few weeks, Google is adding this functionality to Google Analytics. Type your question in plain English or ask it out loud, and Google will give you an answer.

Type your question in plain English or ask it out loud, and Google will give you an answer.

So what’s the catch? None really; the functionality is coming to both the free and paid versions of Google Analytics. The system does not yet handle languages other than English, and only provides insights for “what?” and “how many?” types of questions at this stage. Support for “why?” type questions

The system does not yet handle languages other than English, and only provides insights for “what?” and “how many?” types of questions at this stage. But support for “why?” type questions is coming.

Last week Google previewed a new “smart” news feed coming soon to its app on Android and iOS devices — and eventually to desktops.

The updated news feed is already available to US users and will be rolled out internationally over the next few weeks.

While no timeframe has been given for the desktop implementation, the move is a dramatic one. It means that the clean, minimalist Google Search homepage long familiar to desktop users will soon be no more.

News stories in a person’s feed will be selected based on their location, search history, the YouTube videos they watch, Google Play music downloads, and signals from other Google services such as Google Maps. A “follow” button will allow them to track specific news topics in their feed.

We like survey results that help confirm that what we do, the reason we get up on a workday morning, gets our clients good results. And it’s for that reason we’ll happily accept the conclusions of Hanapin Marketing’s first “State of Paid Social 2017” report.

According to the report, 87% of marketers think paid search ads are their best-performing tactic. Some 60% of those surveyed will invest more in paid search this year, and over 70% plan to increase social media investment.

Nice numbers, but the report itself is short on details, with no reference to the research methodology.

We suspect that only US agencies, brands and consultants were surveyed, but how large the sample size was we don’t know. Hopefully, it wasn’t just an informal poll the CEO had with his drinking buddies.